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How the Met Office is preparing for an explosive growth in data

March 18, 2018 by

Diginomica – CIO Charles Ewen says linkages with technology providers will help the Met Office generate big value for the public purse.

Huge increases in the amount of data produced, stored and processed means public sector organisations must think now about how they will work with external providers to create benefits for the citizen and other partner organisations.

That is the view of Charles Ewen, CIO at the Met Office, who is helping the UK’s weather service manage an exponential growth in information. Ewen joined the Met Office eight years ago and moved into the CIO position five years ago. He has spent the past few years pushing a digital transformation initiative at the organisation, which has included the procurement of three Cray XC40 supercomputers.

These systems, which are three of the world’s 50 largest supercomputers, are capable of processing more than 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second. The supercomputing project is expected to enable £2bn of socio-economic benefits across the UK through enhanced resilience to severe weather and related hazards. Potential benefits include better forecasting at airports, more sophisticated modelling related to flooding, improved information for energy markets, and new climate impacts research.